Need to make a PowerPoint for your class? Yup, that’s right: a PowerPoint, not a presentation. The staple of Microsoft’s Office Suite, PowerPoint is synonymous with presentations these days. But it’s far from the only way to create presentations and share them with your audience.

In the past, we’ve covered 280 Slides and SlideRocket, not to mention Google Docs Presentations, that lets you create presentations online. Today, we present to you yet another very handy online utility, Easy Web Content Presenter, that lets you create feature rich presentations online with a bit more control over them than you’ve ever had before.

When you think of the classics of videogaming – those games which have survived every format and console that time has thrown at them – what springs to mind? Tetris. Metroid. Mario. And then there’s Bomberman. This brilliantly addictive strategic bomb-‘em-up has been around since the days of coin-op arcades, and has been released in dozens of iterations. Sadly, however, Konami (owner of the franchise) has somewhat let Bomberman slide into obscurity.

In response, some Bomberman fans have developed their own free, online version, and they have called it Bombermine. But rather than make a simple clone, the folks behind Bombermine have gone the extra mile, and created a MMO built in HTML5. There are already thousands of happy fans getting stuck in to this relatively new browser-based game, but does it capture the fun of Bomberman’s arcade glory days?

About a month ago, I rounded up a set of 10 tiny but really useful free web apps for designers. Given how well the app ecosystem on the web has evolved over the years, there’s no reason to stick with the theme of designers, so here’s a list of 10 similar apps, but for web developers.

Made by one of the most prolific community of professionals on the web, for themselves and other like them. All these apps are simple, focused on doing one thing and doing it right. If you are a web developer, they all might come in pretty handy at some point or another.

When’s the last time you read a technical book that didn’t make your head spin? One that you actually learned something from, and didn’t fall asleep while reading it? One that inspired you to get up and create something better?

Book reviews aren’t exactly what you’ve come to expect from AppStorm. There’s not lots of books about web apps, though Steven Levy’s In the Plex is a great example of an excellent book about web apps: the whole Google ecosystem. But, if you’re wanting to build your own web apps or sites, you’d do well to start with reading books. Seriously. Good books can be invaluable resources, no matter how experienced you are. It’s even better when the books are actually interesting and make it easy to learn.

Flickr, a popular image sharing site owned by Yahoo!, is a great place to view artistic and creative pictures for free. While Flickr is a great service, the website has an outdated design and can run slow on some browsers. While searching for a photo viewing alternative to the standard Flickr site, I came across a beautiful HTML5 web app: Flickr Browsr.

Flickr Browsr lets you view images hosted on Flickr’s website while aiming to fix all of Flickr’s website annoyances. Addressing both design issues and website speed, Flickr Browsr successfully implements a clean design and uses HTML5 to make sure the web app runs smoothly on any browser without using Adobe Flash. If you’ve been looking for a new way to browse through Flickr’s wealth of photos, this might be the photo web app you’ve been looking for.

Slideshows are a great way to showcase images on digital displays. Whether it’s a collection of old family photos, snapshots from my last vacation, or even my portfolio of professional photography, I always try to put together a picture slideshow for my audience.When the images advance in sequence by themselves, the viewer is less distracted and can take in the message that each picture is conveying, since they don’t have to click or flip through them manually.

It’s easy to put together a slideshow on your PC or Mac, and most webmasters with some coding experience can put together a slideshow with JavaScript and jQuery modules without much of a fuss. But what if you’re not a web developer and need to share pictures online with friends and family? Well, you can try SlideMyPics. It’s a great little app that allows you to gather up your photos that are already online and create an elegant slideshow that you can share easily or even embed in your blog. Let’s make a few slideshows and see how well this app works, shall we?

Ever since Google killed off Google Gears, users were left without any way to access their Gmail accounts without internet. Google said they were ending Gears because they wanted to focus on implementing HTML5 to get a newer, more complete, and less plugin-based system for offline email.

Even though it’s been a long time in the making, Google’s finally kept their word: the Offline Gmail app is now available for free in the Chrome Web Store. Let’s check out what it’s like!

Not long ago, games were meant for hardcore gamers and were for those with high end desktops. But now, there are so many games available in so many forms, people actually have to find some time in between games to catch up with work. Every kid and their grandma is now playing one game or another, thanks largely to casual and social games.

Browser based games are immensely popular because they are real fun to play and most of them even work behind the firewall of organizations. These games might appear simple, but in fact a lot of design and coding has to be done to bring them to life. For those with cool ideas but no coding knowledge, apps like Scirra Construct are a boon. After the break, let’s dive in and see how to create our very own browser based game in HTML5.

Windows 8 looks fairly awesome, a definite advancement in the user interface work at Microsoft. I’ve always been a fan of Metro on Windows Phone 7, and can’t wait to get a chance to install the Windows 8 developer preview on my MacBook Air to check out the Metro UI on a traditional computing machine. While it’s still a Microsoft product, Windows 8 is something radically different and is only helping the web standards cause.

Microsoft is using a “new application model” for Windows 8, which includes powering apps with standards-compliant HTML and Javascript. Plus, they’re ditching Flash.

Up front, I’d like to admit that I’m no coder. My knowledge of HTML is rudimentary at best – simply formatting tags for text often give me a run for my money. But I like to think I can recognize when something really cool is happening in the web development space. I remember watching one of the first demonstrations of HTML5 a while back: Google had changed their homepage logo (as they sometimes do) to a cluster of floating bubbles that reacted to the position of your cursor pointer. I was really impressed by this, because it was the kind of thing that typically required flash, or some similar technology. The implications of this were huge, particularly for flash-like functionality on iOS devices.

OLO is a simple, web-based, two-player game designed with CSS3 and HTML5 by the folks at Sennep. It is meant to be played on a touch device–the same webpage that will execute the game on a touch device is simply instructional on a desktop browser. In addition to playing in the browser of your touch device (for my tests, I used the iPad), you’re invited upon visiting to add a shortcut to the page to your home screen, which enables offline play.